Canaano-Akkadian Some Methodological Requisites for the Study of the Amarna Letters from Canaan Shlomo Izre’el 1 Introduction 1 1.1 The Amarna letters and their language The Amarna letters are named after the site in Egypt in which they were discovered. These letters were sent to the Egyptian pharaohs Amenophis III and his son Akhenaten around the middle of the 14th century B.C. Among the senders were the kings of Babylonia, Assyria, Hatti and Mittanni, as well as minor rulers of the Near East at that time. The letters were written in the cuneiform script, most of them in Akkadian or what was thought to be Akkadian by the scribes who wrote them (I will elaborate on this issue later). During the second millenium B.C., Akkadian, or what is now termed Peripheral Akkadian, served as the lingua franca, i.e., the diplomatic language, of the Ancient Near East. Many of the letters were sent to the Egyptian pharaohs by the rulers of Canaanite city-states, which were at that time under the sovereignty of Egypt. When we examine the letters in terms of their linguistic structure, we realize that most of them were not written in the common Peripheral Akkadian dialect, but rather in a mixed language: Akkadian almost entirely predominated in its lexical inventory, while Canaanite, the mother-tongue of the scribes who wrote these letters, predominated in the domain of grammar. The latter influenced the syntax and the morphology of this mixed language, and affected its phonology and semantics. Here and there a purely Canaanite word appears, written in the cuneiform syllabary, to translate a particularly difficult Akkadian word or a (Sumerian) logogram. These are the famous glosses of the Amarna letters. To highlight the characteristics of this mixed language and the differences between the language of the Canaanite letters and that of letters from other sites, let us take a look at two passages from the Amarna correspondence. (1) mḫa-ti-ip i-il-la-kà-am (5) ù ú-ub-bá-la-am a-ma-te .MEŠ (6) LUGAL EN -ia bá-nu-tam ù DÙG.GA -ta (7) ù ḫa-ad-ia-ku ma-gal ma-gal (8) ù KUR-ia ù ŠEŠ.MEŠ-ia (9) LÚ.MEŠ.ÌR ša LUGAL EN-ia (10) ù LÚ.MEŠ.ÌR mtù-u-tù EN -ia ┌ ┐ (11) ḫa-du 4-nim ma-gal ma-gal (12) i-nu-ma i-il-la-kà-am (13) ša-ar-ru ša LUGAL EN-ia (14) UGU -ia i š-tu a-ma-te .MEŠ (15) EN-ia DINGIR-ia ┌ ┐ ┌ ┐ dUTU x(ERIM) -ia (16) ù i š-tu a-ma-te . MEŠ mtù-u-tù (17) EN-ia la a-pa-at ̣-ṭar Ḫatip has come and brought the nice and good words of the king, my lord, and I am very very glad. My land and my brothers, the servants of the king, my lord, and the 1This paper is a revised version of a paper delivered at the El-Amarna Centennial Symposium held in Chicago on February 1987. The writtenversionof that paper was submittedfor publicationin the proceedings of that conference, which, however, have never been published. Machine-typed copies of that paper have been circulating and were occasionally referredto by some of my colleagues on various occasions (I am thankful that they have found this paper worthy of academic discussion). Therefore, I felt it necessary to make the paper available tothe public. The original version, very slightly edited and with some (very few) bibliographical additions was recently mounted on the web, anticipating the version published here (Izre’el 1987c). I thank the editors of this volume, Manfred Bietak and Orly Goldwasser, for makingthis forum available for this paper, which, so I believe, conforms to the goals of this publication. Thanks are alsodue to Robert Wilson, AnsonF. Rainey, and the late Naphtali Kinberg, whocommentedon some of the issues presented inthis paper whenpreparing the original version. Thanks to Tony Badranwho read the second version. I further thankUri Horesh, whokindly assistedme ineliminatingsubstratal influence from this revisedversion. Lastly, I wish to thankEitan Grossman, my copy editor, whose skills andknowledge have contributed significantly to make my ideas expressed clearly tomy audience. Izre’el, Canaano-Akkadian — 1 servants of Tutu, my lord, are very very glad when the breath of the king, my lord, comes to me. From the orders of my lord, my God, my Sun-God, and from the orders of Tutu, my lord, I shall not deviate. (EA 164: 4-17) (2) a-nu-ma (23) ┌is ̣┐-ṣú!-ru ù a-nu-ma (24) [ i]š-te-m[u ]UD.KAM-ma (25) ù mu-ša a-wa-ti 7.MEŠ ša (26) LUGAL EN-ia ù yi-il 5-ma ![-ad ] (27) LUGAL EN-ia a-na ÌR -šu (28) nu-kúr-tu 4 iš-tu HUR.SAG̮ (29) a-na ia-ši ù ra-as ̣-pa-ti 7 \ b[a-n]i-t[i] (30) É 1-en URU ma-an-ḫa-ti 7 šum-ši (31) a-na šu-ši-ri a-na pa-ni (32) ÉRIN.MEŠ pí-ṭá-at LUGAL EN -ia Here I guard and here I obey day and night the orders of the king, my lord. May the king, my lord, be informed about his servant: There is war from the mountain against me. So I built ‘bani:ti ’ one house, Man hati̮ by name, to prepare for the pdt- troops of the king, my lord. (EA 292: 22-32) The first passage is taken from a letter of Aziru, the ruler of the northern land of Amurru, and it is written in a language that shows close affinities with Akkadian. The second passage is taken from a letter of Ba ’lushiptu, ruler of the city of Gezer in southern Canaan, written in the mixed language used by Canaanite scribes, which I have termed Canaano-Akkadian (Izre’el 1998a). For the differences note especially the use of the verbs. The two letters can be distinguished both in their verbal morphology and in their TMA (=Tense-Mood-Aspect) system. The letter from Amurru, EA 164, has the prefix a- for the 1SG ( apat ̣ṭar , l. 17) and i- for the 3rd person (e.g. illakam , ll. 4, 12); it also has the ending -u:ni (m) for the 3PL ( ḫadu:ni (m), l. 11). It uses the ventive ending -am extensively ( illakam ) and the normal Akkadian imperfective (‘present-future’, ‘durative’) and stative forms. The Gezer letter, on the other hand, has forms with initial i for the 1SG ( is ̣ṣuru , l. 23), while the 3SGM has a y- prefix, as in the Northwest Semitic (henceforth: NWS) languages ( yilmad , l. 26); there is extensive use of the NWS suffix conjugation with active meaning, both by means of attaching the suffix verbal person morphemes to Akkadian stems (as in ras pa:tị , l. 29), and by using pure Canaanite patterns (this feature is attested here only in the gloss for ras pa:tị , viz., bani:ti ‘I built’). Another important feature is the use of the Canaanite verbal modus morphemes, as in is ̣ṣuru and ištemu (ll. 23 and 24 respectively), reflecting the indicative ending, or yilmad , reflecting the jussive -ø suffix. 1.2 The state of the art The Amarna tablets have drawn much attention since their discovery in 1887, and considerable research effort has been invested in studying the linguistic characteristics of these letters. The last decade of the 19th century saw the decipherment and the publication of the texts. The first decade of the 20th century witnessed Knudtzon’s great achievement in the publication of his monumental edition of the texts (Knudtzon 1907 [=1915, vol. 1]gi), still the standard edition in use today. There immediately followed studies by Böhl (1909), Ebeling (1910; also in Knudtzon 1915: II: 1358-1583) and Dhorme (1913-14), who gave us the first descriptions of the language of these texts and noted the mixed nature of Canaano-Akkadian, in which many of the letters from Canaan were written. After a few decades of neglect, the fifth and sixth decades of the 20th century gave us the studies by Albright (mainly 1942, 1943a,b, 1944) and especially by Moran, who described the syntactic features of the Amarna letters from Byblos and who was the first to see that the Canaanite modal system was an inherent feature of the language of these letters (Moran 1950a; see his collected Amarna studies, 2003). The eighth decade of the 20th century was the age of morphological study, mainly by Rainey (1971, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1978b), and the beginnings of holistic and detailed Izre’el, Canaano-Akkadian — 2 studies of several subcorpora within the Canaanite domain, written at Tel-Aviv University under Rainey’s supervision (Nitzan 1973; Izre’el 1976, 1978; Finkel 1977; Rabiner 1981). These lines of research have become mainstream in the linguistic study of the Amarna letters. Scholars followed the path paved by Moran and Rainey with studies of the larger corpus or of specific subcorpora, either holistically or for specific linguistic domains, mainly morphology and morphosyntax (Youngblood 1961; Kossmann 1987-1988; Smith 1998; Westhuizen 1992, 1993). Syntax and discourse structure have also been given attention (Hayes 1984; Gianto 1990; Rainey 1992; 1996: vol 3: in passing and ch. XIII; Westhuizen 1994; Zewi 1995, 1999), as has phonology (Shehadeh 1968, 1987; Izre’el 1987a, 2003a; Sivan 1984). Apart from these studies, progress has been made in the study of the lexicon (mainly Ebeling in Knudtzon 1915, vol. II; Rainey 1970, 1978a; Moran 1984; Sivan 1984; Izre’el 1998b, 2003b), as well as in the study of phraseology, idiomatics, style and rhetoric (e.g., Böhl 1914; Jirku 1933; Gevirtz 1973; Liverani 1983; Hess 1989, 1990, 1993b, 1998; Mangano 1990; Izre’el 1995a; Rainey 2002: 50-53).